Strategy

Plexxikon’s strategy is to partner with pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies at the IND candidate or early clinical stage.

By partnering, Plexxikon has been able to fund an increasing number of drug candidates now in development, increasing collaboration productivity as well as growing its own portfolio of retained assets. The company's portfolio approach ensures that targets are selected and explored for multiple therapeutic opportunities, offering the greatest potential value for current and future partners, as well as Plexxikon shareholders.

Capabilities

Plexxikon's Scaffold-Based Drug Discovery Platform™ starts with the screening of its scaffold-like compound candidate library, followed by the use of structural data to select scaffold candidates and drive chemistry optimization to identify potential drug candidates.

The platform has been applied to multiple drug targets in a number of protein families, including kinases, phosphodiesterases, nuclear hormone receptors and aspartyl proteases. The company has established a diverse screening library of scaffold-like compound candidates, robust protein expression and co-crystallography systems, standardized biochemical and cell-based assays for many targets within each of these families, proprietary computational modeling algorithms, and a strategic synthetic and medicinal chemistry team.

Plexxikon's platform approach has proven to be particularly amenable to the design of highly selective inhibitors of kinase targets. This specialty will be very important in the development of kinase drugs outside of the field of cancer in diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis where the safety hurdles are higher.